Apple featured big in this week’s headlines. Firstly for its seemingly endless sales and profit performances and secondly for its ‘evil’ activities recording every iPhone’s location history in hidden file. Or course, the amount of evil actually being perpetrated depends on which news story you read.
If you happen to have missed all the hoo-hah, it centers around the discovery of a previously unnoted file present on iPhone and iPod devices that has been recording location and time-stamped data since the mid-2010 release of the iOS 4 software update. This effectively becomes a comprehensive log of all user movement and activities over a period of time. British researchers Alisdair Allan and Pete Warden reported the discovery at this week’s Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
Not only did they find this hidden ‘feature’ they also had the ‘audacity’ to release a program on the Internet that not only accesses the info on anyone’s iOS device but also cleverly displays its location data on a map for any date period. I could not resist the temptation but was concerned to find that not ALL my locations had been recorded! Could this be a bug in an Apple program? Heaven forbid!
It was, therefore, not surprising that attacks came from all quarters, and what a relief for Google now that Apple is attracting the attention of the conspiracy theorists! It’s not so much that the devices track location, that is a feature present on most smartphones these days, it is the issue that the user does not know of the file and that it is backed up by iTunes and transferred to a users new device, thereby ensuring its longevity, and potential access by unauthorized third parties.
Tracking the location of people using cell triangulation is a common practice, in fact, it is mandated in many jurisdictions for use by law enforcement agencies. Mobile operators even sell location information back to their own customers for child tracking, etc. as well as third parties looking for particular demographic groups.
The discoverers emphasized that there is no evidence that Apple itself has access to this data. However, the big stink for Apple is that they didn’t make the existence of the file public knowledge, or did they?
Those ever-vigilant (and sometimes anal) souls like myself, that bother to read all the Terms & Conditions confronting them will have noted that those on Apple’s iPhone Software License in Clause 4 (b):
“Location Data. Apple and its partners and licensees may provide certain services through your iPhone that rely upon location information. To provide and improve these services, where available, Apple and its partners and licensees may transmit, collect, maintain, process and use your location data, including the real-time geographic location of your iPhone, and location search queries. The location data and queries collected by Apple are collected in a form that does not personally identify you and may be used by Apple and its partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services. By using any location-based services on your iPhone, you agree and consent to Apple’s and its partners’ and licensees’ transmission, collection, maintenance, processing and use of your location data and queries to provide and improve such products and services.â€
What can be said for the histrionics of US Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) shooting off a letter to Apple CEO Steve Jobs stating, “There are numerous ways in which this information could be abused by criminals and bad actors.” Somebody should have told him that Mr Jobs is on leave just now and probably not reading letters from anybody. Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) went further by saying, “I’m deeply disturbed by this report, I have been concerned that current law fails to ensure consumers are protected from privacy violations. Consumers are often left to learn of these breaches of privacy from hackers and security experts because companies fail to disclose what data they are collecting and for what purpose.”
Strange coming from a government that probably amasses more personal data for security reasons than the rest of the world combined. The same one that uses scanning devices to look through people’s clothes at airports and probably knows what each of them had for breakfast this morning.
The point here is that personal data is being collected and used by multiple agencies and enterprises each day. Google now doubt tracks every search you make so that it can improve the algorithms over time. Amazon knows what other people like you also looked at and bought in its store. Mobile operators are providing the location data for connected devices, are they an accessory to any crime that Apple may be committing.
There is no defense for any invasion of privacy but it is such a common and prolific activity in this digital age it is probably too late to change anything. Information is definitely the currency of the era and it is being traded at all levels of enterprise and government. I think it is fair to say this cat is well and truly out of the bag.
Interesting article.
Your article does pose a fairly important hypothesis and that is –
1) Can any system or organization be intelligent enough to know about you ( anyone!) with all these details?
2) If I visited the toilet 10 times in the last 4 hrs with my LBS activated iPhone in my pocket, will I be prescribed a Anti-diarrheal? Really??
3) Or is this just ‘ROBOTs taking over the world’ kind of Terminator rubbish, we have been hearing all along.
My question – with a plethora of personal data being available all along, are there systems intelligent enough to make any sense out of them? Or worse, make any voyeuristic money out of it?
Hi Naresh, in response:
1) Yes, and they are doing it today. If it’s online they know about it.
2) Armed with this information an enterprising operation like Google might just sell the info to someone in your area that sells Immodium. Presto, they call you and offer to deliver (because you are obviously in no state to go out)!
3) Nothing here indicates robots taking over the world but machines are definitely collecting data on all of us that may be used in future.
Tony, Naresh,
I would go one further in responding to Naresh’s question about intelligence amidst huge amounts of location data. Governments are sponsoring academic research into analysing data on location and movement to make determinations about a person’s likelihood of being a criminal. This includes trying to tell who is a car thief by how they walk across a car park, and trying to tell who is a burglar by the pattern of their movements around a town. Just because we’ve not yet seen this research implemented does not mean that governments aren’t interested in pursuing the goal. If we think about the time it takes to get from scientific research to robust application, useful results may still be a way off. But we should be genuinely concerned that applications like these could be implemented before there has been any informed public debate about their desirability. As we’ve seen with other kinds of technological progress, like GM crops or biofuels, once economic momentum has built up behind it, the opponents can find it hard to put the brakes back on. One imagines that many Japanese are wondering about the desirability of nuclear power right now, though they were doubtless told many times about the need for it and the high standards of safety. You don’t have to be a luddite to recognize it’s hard for the public to express their wishes, if they don’t even know what is coming or what the dangers are. Companies wouldn’t collect data if they didn’t think they would profit from it eventually. But the public doesn’t tend to hear much about what data is being collected (until after it is collected) and even less about why.
There is an obvious justification for intelligent use of data for law enforcement. However, you don’t need to be a conspiracy nut to calculate that once you develop ways to predict who is criminal based on their movements, it’s a small additional step to using the analysis of a person’s movement for other evaluations about who they are and what they are doing.
Thanks Tony/ Eric.
Very interesting answers indeed.
Cheers!